Where is the money going?!

[WilderHawthorn]

All we seem to hear at the moment is that spending needs to be cut and tax increased. I’m a middle earner (not higher rate tax) and don’t mind paying my fair share. But where is the money actually going?

welfare is being cut
education is on its knees
the NHS is a shambles
roads are atrocious
infrastructure generally seems poor
public transport is useless
social services are appallingly overstretched
the £ is at a terrible rate internationally
food inflation is huge

I get that illegal migrants and adult social care are huge costs, but where is the rest of it truly going? I cannot fathom the situation we’re in, is it truly to service the economic debt from Covid?

Just basing it on your own biased point of view then, okay.

On a 20+ year career of observing the decline of work ethic and the ages associated with that and also networking across multiple national companies in different sectors who have all observed the same thing, extremely biased 🙃

It's going to bureaucrats sending us nasty letters about attendance simply because our DC have been ill and schools with poor hygiene and no ventilation.

And

And where did THAT money get spent?

bailiffs go in an repossess cars, homes, savings, possessions and more when

Imagine going to school to be given fresh full fat milk that hadn’t been refrigerated & not needing time off 👀 needing time off for no ventilation and poor hygiene! You are one of the many problems this country has my dear😂

Welfare hasn't been cut. It is increasing massively year on year.

I don't understand?

No ventilation and poor hygienic means bugs will spread and children become ill. Therefore they need time off school. Why waste money sending nasty letters about it.

im struggling to understand no ventilation 🤔 mobile teaching units of the day with no windows in the height of summer that was no ventilation! Poor hygiene?? Tracing paper for toilet roll so your hand was soaking with wee when you’d done and then washing your hands and ‘drying’ on a reusable towel that rolled around but more often than not was soaking from everyone else using it first, did we get bugs? Damn yes, did we get time off? no! Why? because mum and dad were both working and could not afford the day off to look after you so you’d be sent off to school, that’s the difference!

Privatizations.

Means, straight into the pockets of the idle rich.

Think of housing as an obvious example. When we had council housing, housing benefit went back to the council and circulated. When private landlords came into being it went straight into their bank accounts. Public money direct into the boomers’ pockets (and didn’t they whine about how selfish we were, for objecting to ruining our lives to pay their extended pensions).

For the benefit of youngsters today, at one stage Britain owned, publicly and communally, its energy - both supplies and infrastructure: its water, all of its transport connections, communications - post, telephones, etc. and its education - schools, libraries and universities.

Weird how privatising all that has actually left us all impoverished and much much poorer isnt it.

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-base/billionaire-britain-2025/

What I can’t understand is why are we not more worried as a country that we can’t feed, heat or light ourselves without imports. We are so vulnerable!

Huge inefficiencies and tonne of resource waste.

So much public money pilfered on outsourcing crucial services to private companies who are creaming a huge amount of profit off the top and delivering a substandard service/product/outcome with whatever sum is left.

Effective delivery is hampered by a tonne of process for process sake, bureaucracy and middle managers with vague job descriptions in every organisation that don’t add value. I work in the civil service and the amount of underperforming staff who contribute nothing but busywork is phenomenal, and I don’t think it’s unique to the public sector.

I would disagree, as a ripped-off full fee paying parent. Private schools are a con - they recruit from the same pool of teachers, they don't grow them separately for private schools, I am afraid. I am a product of a state school and thought they knew what they are doing when I sent mine to a fee-paying one. It is all a con - a business in other words, take your money, don't care about teaching.

I must have missed this article at the time… it points the right direction too.

Nowadays the privatised industries are often owned by foreign organisations, so the money given to them by the public does not even stay in the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/23/the-guardian-view-on-billionaire-britain-tax-wealth-fairly-or-face-democratic-unravelling

Hampering growth with NI policy and others, people changing behaviour and opting out, vast debt servicing is just taxes going on that.

Pay more taxes to fill that in and it feels like you don’t get more back.

Now we have let’s borrow to the hilt and pay £100bn on debt servicing because we can’t rein it in.

Those of us who are older knew Labour would be dire from past history . They’ve never been able to run the economy . I fear the UK is so bad now it’ll never recover . More and more people are in despair at doing the right thing by going out to work yet don’t have a bean to show for it .

I think lot of local authority budgets (see e.g. Enfield council in London) are going to private landlords in the form of emergency accommodation/ housing benefit, whilst they close libraries and other community services are cut. I don’t think it’s a sustainable model but no idea when change will come. In the meantime, those few landlords are becoming extremely wealthy.

Ik it was ridiculous

Who told you welfare is being cut?

Welfare is the highest it’s even been. Over 1000 people a day are on going onto PIP because it’s basically become a lifestyle choice for people who can say they have a mental health problem and no one really checks, a bit like the sick note culture.
There are 10 million people of working age who are not working. A million of them young people who just decided that working or learning is just too hard because benefits are so easy to get. And yes, motability cars for ADHD is a thing. It’s complete madness.

The size of the civil service is the highest it’s ever been and their output the lowest ever. There are more administrators in the ministry of defence than soldiers. Just imagine, having more pen pushers than doers, and no one is doing anything to cut the pen pushers.

The size of the immigration related is out of control. £4b a year on asylum accommodation alone, not to mention all the healthcare and other services provided.

Less than half the people in this country are now net contributors while the other half are takers. And the top rate taxpayers are leaving the country like it’s plagued, which it is - by successive corrupt and incompetent governments with this one just putting the final nail in the coffin. Which is that corporation are also on a max exodus. Just imagine that Astra Zeneca, one of the largest on FTSE 100 is leaving to list in New York. The word disaster doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The unions have Labour by the balls, and labour and pissing taxpayer cash is the wall by giving colossal pay rises to train drivers are the like who offer 0 productivity increase in return. Their NHS is a black hole that keeps eating cash with no improvements in return.

Spending is out of control and needs cutting by tens of billions, starting with benefits.

The consocialists turned this country into a dumpster. Liebour came along and set fire to it.

Honestly, anyone earning enough to be a net contributor should get out of this country while they still can.

The latest gem. People pensions are going to be stolen and pissed the wall. Taxes will go up on pension savings.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

Punishing people for saving for their retirement when this is exactly what people need to do given the ageing population. And hitting pension funds when they are capital investors into the economy.

You could not make this shit up. Rachel from Accounts gives a bad name to people working in accounts.

That will down to weak leaders like Sunak and Johnson having to bow down to back bench MPs . It meant building pointless tunnels, repairing churches , building kids playgrounds all to keep them inline. We can build stuff like this but not when MPs who have no clue get involved.

According to the institute of fiscal studies, two thirds of the total goes on public services, so health, education etc, whilst a quarter of all the spending is onsocial security benefits, there’s a good pie chart showing all this on their site , ifs.org.uk

Government borrowing is only possible with a bond market. Government debts are called bonds. If the bond markets say "You're not getting anymore money", that's called a bond market strike. If the government can't borrow anymore, they will throw a massive tantrum and they will be forced to cut spending to the bone and raise taxes further, causing yet more pain.

Something has to give, though, short of a run on the Pound. Money is worthless enough as it is, but the moment the public loses trust in the currency, people will withdraw every penny of savings they have (causing a run on the currency) and then a Sterling crash. It's happened before, in 1992 I think. It prompted us to leave the European Exchange Mechanism. I'm glad it happened to be honest, because if we were still part of that CF we'd probably be on the Euro by now.